


Welcome Interruptions

by celebros



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:12:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celebros/pseuds/celebros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is Winona Kirk, the woman who has turned down each invitation to the yearly memorial ceremonies.  Who is rumored to have refused Starfleet's support payments.  Who, insofar as anyone can tell, hasn't spoken of her late husband or <i>Kelvin</i> in seven years.</p><p>Cadet Christopher Pike needs an interview for his thesis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He's watched the security vid so many times he can replay the clip in his head if he likes, but he flicks his stylus to the right moment in any case. It's not close-in on the woman's face, but he's used the hi-tech zoom feature in the graphics lab to watch the little things: the way her jaw clicks before she moves, for example. She's surrounded by well-dressed men, and he can only see from her shoulders up, but he feels as if he's watched her movements enough by now to guess that her hands are in fists.

The man directly in front of her is talking and taking notes with mad animation, his head bobbing up and down excitedly. The woman is looking at him, but her expression grows increasingly blank as she answers question after question. She stumbles a couple times – Chris can't hear a thing she's saying but he can see her lips moving awkwardly around the words. She doesn't flush or apologize.

And then. Someone else speaks, and the man probably repeats the question, and her jaw clicks - _there_. They're looking at her, waiting for something, and she doesn't stand open-mouthed and   
humiliated. She looks at them and there's nothing in her eyes. He can't see the color, even with the zoom as far as it will go, but they're not even blank, they're space-empty, cut off from oxygen, floating between worlds.

She speaks. He doesn't need sound to know that this is where to insert the words that had been quoted on every celebrity newspaper and Starfleet net board for weeks afterwards, but he wishes he could hear it in her voice. She would probably hate him for that, too – for wanting to capture even that part of her. He's got that little speech memorized, too, and he finds himself mouthing along to it sometimes.

 _Does anyone have anything to ask me but questions about my husband?_ she demands. _Can someone in the universe find something more productive to ask me? I am a living woman, and no matter how I might wish different, he's been dead for ten months, and I don't think there's anything left to be said on the matter. I need to focus on myself, now, and my children._ He imagines that a hint of mania, maybe a small tinge of panic, breaks through the tension in her voice, and she certainly ends on a note of no-nonsense, finality. Every muscle in her body is wound tight, but she gives a small nod afterwards, and he can see how ready she is to be relieved.

There's a moment of hesitation, almost as if someone hit pause on the security feed, and then the fat well-dressed man in front of her says something. No one quite seems to know what he says, because her face becomes a rictus of fury and she lunges forwards, her fist connecting solidly with his face. They both disappear flailing towards the floor, into the mass of suits. Ten seconds pass before she reappears, and thirteen more before the security officers reach her, but she's already calm again, readjusting the shoulders of her tunic and plucking the insignia from her chest as if the motion meant nothing. The officers hesitate to grasp her, but she holds up her hands and turns away from the feed camera to follow them. Chris pauses the vid and leans back in his chair.

Nothing has changed. This is Winona Kirk, the woman who has turned down each invitation to the yearly memorial ceremonies. Who is rumored to have refused Starfleet's support payments. Who, insofar as anyone can tell, hasn't spoken of her late husband or _Kelvin_ in seven years.

He needs an interview for his thesis.

***

He convinces himself the use of transport credits is reasonable: if Kirk turns him down by vid message, he'll have to make follow-up attempts to show that he made reasonable effort. If she turns him down in person – possibly with a bloody nose or a broken cheekbone – he's pretty sure his thesis committee will forgive him the lack and say he's done his best.

The possibility of Winona Kirk inviting him in didn't really occur to him – until he stood on her porch, his pitch delivered, pretending he didn't have a hypo of painkillers in his shoulder-bag in case she did resort to physical violence again. He watches her push at the screen door and tilt her head at him, and a flood of confusion washes over him before he realizes the gesture is a wordless _come inside_.

He follows her, mute and horrifyingly unprepared, into the sitting room. The couch is an unhappy green, the curtains behind it a rich deep blue, and the sun is beating in the window and _he's going to be the first person in seven years to interview Winona Kirk_. He rushes through the formal language requesting permission to audio-record.

She agrees. He wants to curse, in as many languages as possible, and dance like a lunatic at the same time.

He occupies himself with the PADD. Coding, volume, introductory notes. Names. Dates. As if he's about to forget. He's searching for an opening question that won't get him punched in the face. He'd written up questions, because one day he's going to be a starship captain and he thought he was the sort of man to be ready for that. He tells himself that he's dreamt of being convincing enough, of being the right person for her to talk to, because that's the kind of confidence he should have had. The truth is he'd never come near such a hope, and maybe that's as well, because she didn't invite him into her house because of anything about him.

He looks at her face. She's not at all the woman he's been watching in the security feed. The age difference is very evident, but her facial expression is utterly unfamiliar to him, and after weeks of memorizing the way her jaw clenches together before she punches someone, of feeling as if he knows her, or at least her physicality, it's odd to have her sitting before him so unreadable. So clearly a stranger. This is a vision of her he will never be able to replay, never be able to reanalyze.

She looks up at him, and her eyes widen slightly, as if she's realized something. “I'm so sorry,” she says, her voice utterly unremarkable, “I haven't offered you anything to drink. I'm going to get myself a cup of tea; would you like something?”

“I could do with a tea,” he says, just as unremarkable, and she stands and hurries from the room. After a moment, Chris extricates himself from his very comfortable chair and moves towards the tall bookshelf in the corner. It takes restraint not to pace back and forth muttering, “Shit,” but he's got the poise to do this. He looks for something to talk about in the interview – a medallion with George Pike's name carved into it, maybe, pictures or mementos, which seem bizarrely normal, but not unreasonable now that he's standing in an Iowa farmhouse with a quiet Winona Kirk in the next room. He doesn't find any.

The sound of something shattering breaks the quiet, and he's rushing towards the kitchen before he has time to think about it, because he _is_ command track, after all. She's sitting on the floor, slumped against the cabinets, half-steeped tea soaking into her skirt and shards of ceramic fanning out from her in an arcing pattern, as if she's the epicenter of a seismic event. Her face is in her hands, and she's sobbing.

“Ms. Kirk, are you hurt?” he asks, kneeling swiftly beside her and ignoring the tea and ceramic dust attaching themselves to the knees of his uniform slacks. She takes a shuddering breath and stretches out a hand towards him without removing the other from her face, and he can't tell if she's reaching for him or trying to push him away. He gently grasps at her elbow, moving to stand, to help her to her feet, and they both jump as the screen door slams. She uncovers her face, and it's red and so puffy that he realizes she's been crying since she left the living room.

He follows her gaze to the door. There are two boys standing there, both wide-eyed and still, and he knows from weeks of reading the Kirk records that George Samuel is eleven and James Tiberius is of course seven and he can see the woman from the vid now, suddenly and viscerally, in both boys' faces.

“Mom?” the older boy says, quavering slightly.

And then - _there_ \- the shock sliding to fury, and the smaller boy throws himself forwards, and surely _these_ are the motions he recognizes, the physicality he's been studying for a week. The welcome he'd been expecting. The kid's fists are incredibly quick, and he's throwing punches at Chris' hips and stomach and anything he can reach, roaring in fury. It hurts, but not badly enough he tries to stop it – before he's thought to, George Samuel pulls his brother off, holding Chris and the kid each at arms' length because the kid is still swinging. The older boy spins Chris and the kid around and pushes, and he's suddenly aware that he's being marched to the door by an eleven-year-old. He can see Winona's face, puffy and shocked. She's looking straight at him, even as she grabs her still-screaming youngest and pulls him into her shaking arms.

George Samuel guides Chris to the door, pushes it open, and gives him a little shove onto the porch.

“You won't come back,” the boy says, very quietly. And then he turns as if Chris isn't there anymore, moves to his mother and helps her out of the puddle of tea and shards of china, starts picking up the pieces. His voice very calm, he's asking, “Are you okay, Mom? What'd he do? Do you want me to call someone?”

Chris turns mechanically and walks down the steps into the dusty yard.

An hour and a half later, as he checks into his motel, he remembers his PADD, sitting on a table beside George Kirk's armchair.

***

He's got fifteen hours 'til his transport back to San Francisco. There's nothing to see in Riverside – a look at the 'net turned up a quarry large enough to park a spaceship in, a tiny museum documenting the environmentalist movement in Iowa a century and a half before, some local fluff about a new hololibrary. There are rumors of a _Kelvin_ memorial in the works; he might have to visit again if that turns into something substantial before his thesis is due. He wonders if Winona knows more about it, and how she feels about it. He wonders why she lives in the sandpit town in the first place – if it's sentimentalism, if it's a way to hide. He doesn't have the patience to think about it anymore. He'd gotten _so close_.

He sits on the balcony of the crappy motel, forgoing the ancient folding chair in favor of the slightly chilly ground. The weather's not too bad, at least, and some part of him wants to jump on his rented cycle and drive – somewhere, anywhere else. To Minnesota – he's heard the southern bluffs have spectacular fall color, and wonders if it's late enough in the year for that – to the 'Fleet base in Chicago; he's going to have to visit eventually to get his hands on the unedited audio recordings from the _Kelvin_ , but before he can do that he needs to get the authorization from an admiral or an Academy admin. He spends about twenty minutes trying to figure out if he could get one of them to approve him for it in the next eight hours, but there'd be too much to reschedule – the transports, the bike rental, the arm-long list of things he's got to do when he gets back to the Academy. Running away isn't the answer. If he wants to be a 'Fleet captain he's got to be ready to be bored sometimes.

He gets to his feet and leans against the balcony railings, and perhaps on some cosmic cue, a red antique convertible squeals into the lot and Winona Kirk climbs out. She's looking around frantically at the doors on the ground floor, and her face lights up when she sees his cycle. He lifts his hand in an awkward wave, and her eyes catch on the movement. Her whole body seems to relax.

He climbs down the stairs. She's wearing makeup now, subtle enough to be attractive, and by the time he gets down to her, her face is schooled into the blank, polite Iowa expression he'd seen before. Chris doesn't speak, just studies her face for a moment, and he fancies there's a trickle of hope.

“You left your PADD,” she says, looking down and dragging it out of her small purse. She hands it to him hesitantly, and he slips it in his back pocket. “I – I'd like to do the interview.” She meets his eyes again, and now she's firm and distinct. “No one's asked me about it in years. Or – or if they did, someone else shut them up before I could answer.” She laughs, and it's full, not embarrassed. “A bit ironic, I suppose. It is what I asked for. Rather vehemently. But difficult as it is, especially after keeping it in my head for so long, I think enough time has passed.” There's a question in her eyes, and he nods as if he understands what she's asking.

“Do you have a place in mind?” he asks.

She laughs again. “I'm not sure my boys would be too happy to see you again, certainly,” she says. “We're a very protective family, you understand – nothing personal. And I know Starfleet's a cheapskate when it comes to travel allowances.” She gestures at the utterly crappy motel, and it's his turn to laugh.

“In this instance, so small as to be nonexistent,” he says drily. “No, I'm afraid the poor taste in lodging is a reflection on my own thriftiness, and not Starfleet's.”

“You're here on your own bill?” Winona says, not trying to hide surprise, and she seems to reappraise him. “I'll get you dinner. Hell, I know a place with a side room; we can do the interview there.”

“That sounds more than amenable, Mrs. Kirk,” he says, utterly relieved not to have to show her up to his room and even more cheerful at the prospect of not eating at one of the cancerous low-budget eateries.

“Hell with that,” she says. She sounds amused, and he keeps his expression carefully neutral at this pronouncement. “On about six different levels,” she clarifies. “Scrap the Starfleet formal-talk, at least until the audio-recording's on. Drives me to diversion, all this insistence on skirting around what you mean. If I'm going to talk about my dead husband, I'm going to have to be damned blunt about things, and I'm not going to want you using the word 'amenable'. Or 'ma'am' – I won't be ma'am'ed at. It's _Winona_.”

“I can appreciate that,” he says, maybe a bit too politely, because she raises her eyebrow at him.

“You need anything from your room?” she asks. “Then you can just hop in the car, if you don't mind. I'll worry about the driving, Cadet.” She rolls her eyes. “And me just talking about formality – that won't do. What can I call you?”

“Chris is fine,” he says mildly, although really he should say _Pike_. “It's a beautiful car.”

“It was George's,” she says, almost dismissively. “The boys love it; I was always more partial to shuttlecrafts. It's the closest I've got for now, though, so I fix it up when need be, and as long as it's running, I've gotten fond of it on its own merits.”

Winona drives them straight towards the sun; Chris winces and covers his face with an arm and she laughs at him again. Even if he had seriously considered Winona Kirk giving him an interview, he'd never have dreamed she'd laugh so much. Somehow, in all his time watching her on the vid screen, leaping sharp and feral at the well-dressed man, he'd never quite envisioned her as a real person, as someone who had moved on with her life. As a mother. As someone who made tea the old-fashioned way. As a person with depth and nuances. He feels unbelievably guilty, and the ride to the restaurant is silent.

The guilt doesn't subside when he looks at the credit charges on the menu. It's a nice restaurant – the walls, he's pretty sure, are paneled in red mahogany, which is nearly unheard-of except in antiques. Winona must see the stricken look, because she says drily, “If I was broke, I wouldn't turn down the 'Fleet aid, you know,” and on an instinct he challenges, “Wouldn't you?” Maybe it's not the _right_ question, but it's a good one, because she looks back at the menu with a sad smile.

“I've got boys to raise, Chris,” she says finally, laying aside the coolly scrolling laminate and folding her hands. “Where Sam and Jim are concerned, I've had to lie a lot of things by the wayside. Things I might once have referred to as principles.” A wry smile hints at the corners of her mouth. “Do you want to audio-record? Like I said – I'll be talking very frankly with you. I don't think there's any other way to go about it.”

“Would you prefer I didn't?” he asks, half-standing to slide the PADD from his rear pocket. She grabs it from him the instant it's above the table, her fingers cool.

“Do you have a transcription function?” she asks, eyes narrowed critically on the small screen. “Wow, the '35 edition? They haven't come out with updates for this system yet?”

“I think transcription is an option under the direct-message settings,” he says, and lets her find it. She nods slowly, glances up at him a second, and sets the PADD between them on the table.

“You ready to order?” she asks briskly. He's hardly looked at the menu. He examines it for a moment, then sets it aside, folded careful atop hers.

The waitbeing is there so quickly that Chris strongly suspects there's a videomonitor in the kitchen and a cam somewhere above him; he restrains the urge to search for it. It sets tall, slim glasses of water before each of them and asks if they're ready. Winona orders a small dish of butternut squash ravioli and vegetarian stir-fry, casually requesting a specific Vulcan pepper that Chris can't help but think was certainly never made to be fried in soybean oil.

He orders a large plate of corn puppies and a cup of chili. Winona's taking a sip of water at the moment, and nearly spits it out her nose, she laughs so hard. She chokes, swallows, and continues snorting laughter for nearly a full minute. The waitbeing pointedly ignores her, indicates to Chris the buzzer on the wall should they need anything, and excuses itself back to the kitchen. Winona wipes her eyes and sighs out the last of the sound, shaking her head.

“I take you to Bidani's and you order _fair food_ ,” she says, highly amused.

“In honor of the state fair,” he answers, smiling. “Last time I was in Iowa I was eight, and highly impressed with butter sculptures and corn puppies. At the Academy I eat Indian and interplanetary – as long as I'm out here, I might as well get something all-American. You can't find this stuff in San Francisco anymore.”

“Good a reason as any, I suppose,” she says. “We might as well begin transcription, Chris – you never know when one of us might say something worth grabbing.”

“Fair enough.” He spins the PADD to face him and initiates the program with a tap of his finger. “Where should we begin?”

She talks for a while about the things every command-track cadet has heard a hundred times: the scans of the lightning storm. What it had looked like, the way she was unable to look away even through the haze of labor. The enemy ship – everything she can remember about it, the clawlike appendages, the lights. She tells him things that almost any survivor of the wreck can tell, if they were conscious as their shuttles fled, if they can speak of it without their fingers pressed to their lips so hard it might bruise. These are not small ifs, but he pushes anyway. She doesn't laugh now.

Their food arrives; she's quiet for a while, and he's nauseated by the way she transitions from talking about the bodies of friends to single-mindedly attacking her vegetable dish. The Vulcan pepper looks very different fried, plump and shining, almost the orange of California sweet peppers. He watches her eat, and she stops and studies him back for a moment, knit eyebrows and one corner of her mouth quirking. He tries to eat some of the chili. Winona buzzes the server and asks for a chilled bottle of Harvest Moon, and hands it to him. He drinks it quickly. She strikes that order from the transcription, silent and efficient, and starts talking again.

She talks about what it was like to be pregnant on the _Kelvin_. She hadn't announced it immediately when she knew; she was determined to keep at full duties for as long as possible, and had managed to put off her physical for long enough to delay the announcement. Then she'd been placed on roster for a landing party for a potentially hostile situation. She talks about Captain Robau, and then gently corrects herself, calling him Richard, trying a bit fumblingly to describe the look on his face when she'd explained why she couldn't beam down to the planet. “Amazement,” she says first. “Shock. But no… I suppose it was joy. I've spent years trying to pin down these things – that was the second-to-last conversation I ever had alone with him.”

“You had known Captain Robau before your assignment to the _Kelvin_?” Chris asks, trying to imagine joy on Robau's face. He's studied the captain's face, that handful of holologs, almost as long as he has Winona's or George's, but it's always stern or frustrated or questioning, occasionally with a twinkle of anticipation or humor. He tries to imagine the open mouth, the wide, bright eyes that would go with a joy so wide it could be mistaken for shock.

“He was a family friend,” Winona says, nodding. “I never used to talk about that much – back then I was always concerned with making sure no one suspected our friendship was the reason I got the assignment. Richard didn't even realize I was assigned, actually, until a few days before we shipped out.”

She tells him things he mostly already knows – she'd been in what they thought was her fifth bout of false labor in Sickbay when they'd diverted towards the lightning storm, so there's little she can tell of Robau's final command decisions besides what's already on record – but she talks at length, not-quite-tangentially, about examples of his leadership style, his cool-headedness, his love for his ship. She talks in detail about a First Contact mission that Chris doesn't remember from the _Kelvin_ records, maybe because the Starfleet records seem to have been made meticulously boring.

“What do you think George would have said about Captain Robau's decision to give in to the enemy ship's terms?”

Her eyes and mouth tighten, and too late he realizes she still hasn't said a word about her husband since the recording started. She looks at him for a long minute, and he's both relieved and irritated that the transcription won't capture any part of this moment. The text will erase this space, as if it's no longer than any other break between question and answer. He doesn't retract his question, and it's got to be five minutes by the time she answers.

“They're dead, Cadet Pike,” she says. “I can't possibly bring myself to suggest I know what he would say, and what he would mean. I can tell you that Richard's means of relinquishing command indicated he did not expect to be returning to the ship after a two-hour ceasefire talk. He didn't just give George the conn – he named him captain.” She shakes her head, and this is a clear piece of nonverbal communication. This says _you can't possibly understand_. He doesn't. But he wants to.

She buzzes again, and this time asks for a rum and coke. She makes a face as they deliver it, downs it effortlessly, and doesn't even bother striking it from the record. Then she shakes her head, pushing away the warm burn in her mouth and throat and seven years of inhibitions. She looks Chris in the eye, and says flatly, “I didn't tell him I loved him.”

He can't say anything – he stares back at her, and she bites her lip and looks away. She's sobbed in front of him once today, and he's not sure what he's going to do if she starts crying now, although it's not as if anyone could blame her. She takes in a shuddery breath that the transcriber records as “shhhh”, tilts her head back against the wall, and starts talking, and then there are no more gaps in conversation for four hours.

In the end she does cry. She wipes her eyes on her sleeves and doesn't stop talking, though, and aside from a few breaks in the conversation there's no sign on the record. He strikes at least three instances of, “ _CADET CHRISTOPHER PIKE: I know._ ” from the record; and she pauses midway through to request he not talk about her boys in his thesis, to which he agrees.

They leave by unspoken agreement; half the corn puppies are sitting cold on the table, although he did manage to get most of the chili down, but both of her plates are spotless. He doesn't know how; he knows there was still plenty of food left when she began talking about George, and he can't remember her ever stopping to take a bite. She pays the credits and, Chris suspects, a generous tip, and this time when they reach the auto she runs her fingers over the body lightly. He can see her face in the dim moonlight, but she isn't crying or smiling or laughing now. She doesn't say anything, but eventually she climbs into the car and unlocks the passenger door for him to get in.

The drive back through town to the motel is very quiet. She parks next to his rented cycle and holds out her hand for the PADD without turning her head. He half-expects her to delete the entire session, and he doesn't even mind at this point. Instead she presses _resume_ and starts talking again, her voice very quiet now.

“Richard knew he might not come back alive,” she says. “I don't think George did, when he took command. I don't think he had any idea what he was doing. He was a young man from rural Iowa, and he was my husband and my lover; he was smart and brave and articulate and damned funny, and he was a lot of things no one could describe, all of that, but I think of him now, and you know what? He was a _kid_. Maybe he was a hero and maybe he was a martyr but maybe he was just winging it. He flew blind a lot of the time, made lucky guesses, relied on fate and Richard to get him out of dozens of sticky situations. Maybe no one else could have done better. I've heard the stats – it doesn't matter how long it's been since my last interview, these aren't the sort of things that leave your head, once they come to live there. Eight hundred people in twelve minutes, which is more than one person for every second he was Captain. It hasn't happened since.”

She turns to look at him, and in the shadows he can't see anything of her face, but he's studied it, and her, and he knows that her eyes are dark and serious right now. “Starfleet's gotten timid, Chris. They've gotten defensive; a few too many incidents gone wrong here and there and now they happen less often, the reports say, but it's not because they've gotten better at making contact with and understanding other cultures. It's because we've made our interactions predictable, concrete. We're not taking risks, and because of that, we're slowing down. The Vulcan Science Academy has been sending out more exploratory missions than we have, the past few years, and –” She cuts off. “I'm not a part of that world anymore,” she says abruptly. “I'm dirtside now, but it's not because I'm afraid. The ship and the men that killed my husband and my friends are still out there somewhere, and one day we're going to have to find them. Whether we want to or not.”

She presses the _stop_ button, and it lights up again from the activity, a soft white glow illuminating the bottom of her face. She looks at Chris for another long moment.

“Thank you,” he says into the quiet. She hands him the PADD, which is already darkening again, and he wishes he could ask her for just one more laugh.

“Goodbye,” she says. He climbs out of the car and up the stairs to his unlocked mostly-empty hotel room, all without looking back, though he can hear the idling engine below him. He sits on the bed, and then lets himself fall back against it, the a fold of the slightly-rumpled comforter digging politely into his neck and shoulder, feeling full and unfulfilled and utterly, utterly alone.


	2. Chapter 2

When the morning is fresh and the boys are off to school, Winona comes back to the motel, but he’s gone already. The motel parking lot is dusty and empty, his vee gone from its spot, but she pulls in and sits there a moment, looking up at the stairwell-balcony where he’d been when she’d pulled into the lot the evening before, where he hadn’t stopped to look back at her as he slipped back to his room after the interview.

She wondered if Cadet Pike had interviewed anyone else in town. Now that he’s gone she’s not sure about thinking of him as Chris, even after insisting on no formalities, after letting herself cry in front of him.

She wonders if he was frustrated with her refusal to speculate on George’s thoughts and motives in the last minutes of his life. Winona respects her dead husband’s autonomy, wouldn’t presume to speak for him, but beyond that it’s to do with the fact that when he was alive she’d loved his unpredictable nature, the fact that she never knew what he was going to do next. Now that he’s dead, it isn’t quite as endearing. She wishes she could tell someone what he might have thought.

***

In March, Christopher Pike spends almost a year of built-up transport allowance credits in two weeks hopping between the Academy and the hololibrary at the Chicago ‘Fleet base. One abnormally-warm day, a flood of incoming cadets visit, and the demonstrations and tests make the database unreasonably slow. Irritated at the waste of credits, he intends to head back to San Francisco, but then he thinks about visiting Riverside again. There are two questions he has thought to ask Winona since their interview the September before, but these are not the sort of things you ask by message, and he has never been totally comfortable with commlinks. At the same time, these are not questions vital to his thesis, and he is running out of time. Instead he takes a train line into the city proper and holes himself up in the Newberry Library with a PADD, scribbling outlines and paragraphs.

By the end of April Chris has taken over the stuffy back room of a café owned by a retired ‘Fleet captain. The door is locked, just a wisp of eclectic interplanetary music trickling in under the warped wooden door. There are eyewitness sketches of the Great Romulan Ship tacked on the walls, a giant 3-D scale model of the Kelvin on a rickety side table – that had cost him more credits than he cared to think about – next to a cold plate of untouched curry that had cost him practically nothing, which is about how much he has left. He has three PADDs now for the thesis, a copy of the latest draft on each and then different sets of notes and interview transcripts on the others so that he can look at multiple documents at a time.

He comes back to the end of Winona’s interview over and over when he needs perspective on his conclusion. He thinks of the way her face had looked in the dark when she’d said, “ _We’re not taking risks_.” He thinks of talking to her again, but he hasn’t the time. It’s a sprint to the finish line, and when the dissertation is done and turned in it is not a celebration. He calls a few friends, but most of them are either in the throes of final exams or so drunk they don’t know what dive they’re in, so he just buys a glass of Pacific Rim Riesling at a quiet wine bar and, when his old roommate Nashok finds him, lets him ask the room to toast the Kelvin. He finishes the wine, pulls out his PADD, and opens a message with a copy of the dissertation attached.

***

 _Winona_ , it reads,

_I don’t expect you to read this if you don’t want to, but I thought I should give you a chance in case you do. Thank you for your insight. -- Chris_

She does read it, in the attic on a Saturday when the boys are at Tiberius’s. There are more spaces of absence there that she notices – she can see where Chris would have mentioned her and Jim, the points he might have made about George there – but his focus is less on the destruction of the Kelvin than she might have expected, shifting more towards the history of the ship, the missions it completed and how they informed the ‘Fleet about qualities necessary in command officers.

There’s barely anything from her interview there. She doesn’t know if she should resent or appreciate that. She stores it away, determines never to read it again, doesn’t thank Chris for sending it to her and doesn’t know if she feels guilty about that or not.

***

Winona visits the Riverside shipyard once they have built the framework in which the new ship is to be built, and once she’s seen it once she can’t keep away. She brings the boys, who are uninterested, and mentions it to Tiberius, whose mouth closes in a tight line and who shakes his head once, his face full of something that is neither anger nor grief, both of which he has exhausted over the past eight years.

So she goes alone. It’s November, and the boys are in school, so she finds the time once a week. The guards at the gates do not know her face from town, but once she has shown them her ID they remember afterwards, and let her in with expressionless nods.

They’ve begun to build the base of a ship. She finds a small windowed room, meant perhaps for some kind of overseer, with a perfect view of that base. The next week she brings paper and graphite and draws the shape of the hull. She does a skeletal sketch first, then draws the texture, the plating, capturing the hardness of it. She finishes, sets it down and takes a step back to look at it.

Then she erases it in wide angry strokes and brushes off the dust onto the aluminum floor.

This ship, Winona thinks, is not a thing for art and dreams. It is not a symbol of humanitarianism and peacekeeping. They’re building it in Riverside for a reason. Because of George. (They’re going to ask, she suspects, to name the shipyard after him. She’s going to refuse them.) They’re building it because someone remembers that Starfleet needs the best and newest technology, needs to be fast and strong just in case. The ship is a weapon, and she hates that they’re making it beautiful.

That night at home Jimmy says, “You’ve got medals,” because he’s been in the attic digging while she was cooking dinner.

“They’re not mine,” she says, trying not to snort derisive laughter at the idea.

“Whose are they?”

“Dad’s, stupid,” Sam snaps from across the table, pressing a comforting look at her, and that freezes her chest a little, chases the threat of laughter away. Sam is not old enough to be comforting her.

But, she supposes, he _is_ old enough to remember the way people used to ask her questions when she was in town, and the way that any local in earshot would jump between Winona and the stranger, berate them, say horrible things like, “The poor woman has been through enough,” or, “She doesn’t want to talk about it and she’s told you vultures so.”

She breathes in through her nose, judiciously, and then says, “Don’t call your brother stupid, George Samuel,” unwavering. He flushes, shovels sweet corn in his mouth.

“Sorry,” he mutters around his food.

“Jimmy, do you have questions about your father’s medals?” she asks, putting her fork down and folding her fingers. He stares at her for a moment like she’s a foreign creature, looks at Sam, who does not look back at him, and then shakes his head, and she _wants_ him to want to know.

“They talk about it in school, Mom,” Sam tells her later, when Jim has gone to bed. “The older kids all ask about it. There’s a whole unit on ‘Fleet history for seventh-graders, and they hear Dad’s name and then they find us at free time.”

“They don’t make fun of you,” she says fiercely, making sure it’s not a question, but Sam shakes his head as if it was.

“Not mostly,” he says. “They just think we go to space and know all the admirals and all kinds of stuff, and they’re kinda disappointed when they find out we don’t.”

“Not mostly?” she asks.

“A couple of them say we think we’re the best ‘cause of Dad being a hero,” Sam says. “But they’re just jealous.”

Winona wonders, that night in bed, if it has been jealousy she has seen and not been able to identify in the younger women of the town. It has never occurred to her that a dead husband is something to envy.

***

Frank works at the shipyards. She knows his name because he wears it on a badge on his shirt, and it’s a few months of visits before she has a face to attach to the name, because his eyes and hair are obscured by a blast helmet. She brings coffee to the workers sometimes, when she comes in the late morning, and he is one of the four or five who sit at a table with her during their lunch break. Two of these are women, taller and broader than she is, with hearty laughs; the men are usually quiet when she is there, except when they thank her for the brew.

The first real words that she exchanges with Frank rock her. He sits at the table first, that morning, before the bell has rung for break, and does not take a cup of coffee. Instead he pulls off his helmet, sets it beside him on the bench, and looks at her with intense blue eyes.

“When you were on the _Kelvin_ , did you know Lieutenant Tanner Riley?” he asks.

Her first instinct is to say, “I don’t talk about the _Kelvin_ ,” and her second is to say, “Did he live or die?” and what she goes with is the third, which is to say crisply, “What department was he in?” breaking eye contact for a moment as if this topic of conversation is only tenuously holding her interest.

“Sciences,” Frank says. “He was a botanist. He used to write to me about away missions, though I never really got what he was talking about. Never mentioned you or your husband by name, but I looked back at the messages a couple weeks back, and he said something about the first officer once. A few months before the –” his eyebrows knit, just briefly, a pause just barely long enough to be noticed – “destruction.”

“Were you in the ‘Fleet then?” she asks.  
“No,” he says firmly, “and I’m not now, either – just a contractor. I like to be dirtside.”

“I didn’t know him,” she says, unapologetic, “but my husband would have, if he was a regular on away missions. He was friendly with the scientists. Took them for drinks when we went on shore leave, more than once.”

Frank nods. “That’s something to know,” he says.

No one else sits by them that day. A few come by to grab coffees and then skirt away to other tables; she barely notices. Frank asks her questions and she answers them quickly, greedy for more. When the bell rings for midday shift to begin, she says, “I’ll buy you a drink sometime if you want to talk more,” and he looks at her consideringly.

“I’ll let you know,” he says, and the next week when she comes by he grabs a coffee, takes a long drag from it, and sighs. “Nine o’clock?” he asks.

“Would earlier work for you?” she says. “Say seven? I’ve got to be home to put my boys to bed.”

He gives her that same considering look, unblinking, and nods once.

***

Winona tells Frank about the _Kelvin_ and realizes she wants the stars again. It’s a moment – there’s no hesitation in it for her, but she doesn’t tell him, because he’s still a stranger for whom she’s buying a glass of stout. He puts his hand on hers and it feels _good_ , like something that no one she has told about the _Kelvin_ has been able to do before. No one has comforted her the way she needed, because those were interviews and this is a conversation.

In a way it is a relief, this realization. It has been so long since she wanted things the way she can feel she wants the stars. She wanted to talk to Chris Pike when he turned up at her door and when Sam marched him out of their house and when she tracked him down to his motel. She remembers that – the process of wanting something, what it felt like to follow it. And she wanted to take Sam to Chicago for his birthday, like he’d asked, although she hadn’t been able to do that – Jim could not handle that trip, and even Tiberius couldn’t take the almost-nine-year-old on for a full weekend. And she wants George back, although that’s distant after all these years. Now she wonders if he would ever have grown up enough to come dirtside with her and raise two children and be loud and quiet at the right times, the way a parent needs to be loud and quiet.

But wanting the stars is a thing she can latch onto, a thing that will make her write and draw and remember, a thing that might bring her back to life a little. She knows she has not been vibrant, the last eight years – that she has lived for her children and that that has not always been enough. The moment she realizes that what she is feeling is wistfulness, she wants to take Frank’s hands and tell him, and share this epiphany with someone, but he is a solemn-faced stranger with a dead friend who knew her dead husband, so she doesn’t.

Frank takes her hand in both of his in a firm shake when they part that night, his eyes meeting hers with solid grateful honesty only partially borne of liquor. They agree to meet the next week for lunch – Frank says gruffly that they’ve talked too much about people long dead and not enough about themselves, and she agrees with enough consciousness beyond the haze of sudden wanderlust to be touched that he wants to know about _her_.

It’s late, but she already knows she’s not going straight home. She needs to chase this a little, be selfish for a while, sort out the wilderness in her head before she goes home to the boys. She goes back into the bar and buys a shot of Jose Cuervo, but that’s not enough. She’s probably had too much to drink to be driving, but she’s not about to call a cab. She climbs into George’s old car and drives without thinking to the shipyard.

There is no one at the gates, and she certainly doesn’t have override codes, so she drives back to a distance and traces the shape with her eyes, the small gently-curved belly of what will become a starship. Beyond its great dark mass, she can see the stars of systems she’s visited. The waning moon is rising behind her, and she remembers that everything is so large and has so much extra room, so much space for her to breathe – everything, of course, except Riverside.

She has a spare PADD in the glove compartment, and with the stars and the ship still before her, she sends Chris Pike a message. She thanks him for sending the dissertation, politely expresses her not-unpleasant surprise at his angle, and signs it _Winona_ , because anything else would be a step backwards. It all looks very curt, distant, and she knows why she is telling him and what she needs to add. She types out a postscript – “ _I talked about the_ Kelvin’s _destruction again today, for the first time since I spoke to you. Thank you._ ”

It’s eleven by the time she gets home. The sitter, a senior named Eric who goes to Riverside Secondary, is half-asleep on the couch, and Winona doesn’t bother with the customary “how-was-Jim” debrief, just pays him double and sends him home. She wanders into the kitchen for a glass of water, rounds the island counter, and jumps, years of ‘Fleet training keeping her from needing to stifle a scream but still feeling where the scream would be in her throat. Jim is sitting on the far side of the cupboards, wearing his blue-striped pajama bottoms and gazing up at her with a look that cannot be mistaken for anything other than accusation.

“What are you doing up?” she asks.

“Waiting for you,” he answers flatly.

“Jimmy, school’s in the morning. Eric put you to bed, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he do it wrong? Couldn’t you sleep?”

“I was waiting for you,” he says again, stubbornly.

“Baby –”

“No I’m _not_ ,” he growls. “You were supposed to be _home_ , you were supposed to be back at nine-fifteen, you _said_ –”

She can feel her mind, still slow and thick from alcohol, building up all sorts of answers to that, none of which she wants to share with her nine-year-old son – most of them along the theme, “You take so much from me, I needed more time to myself,” and, “I gave up the stars for you,” which is terrible mostly because it’s essentially true, and she wants to say, “Baby,” again but he doesn’t like that. She closes her eyes, leans back against the ‘fridger, and bites her lower lip.

“Jim,” she says quietly, awkwardly, “I’m sorry I didn’t call when I knew I would be late. You know I lose track of time. I was stargazing, Jimmy.”

His lower lip quivers briefly, his eyebrows still narrowed and mouth tight in a boyish pout.

“If it’s clear out tomorrow I can show you. Jimmy, please. Okay? But I need you to go to bed now.”

He looks at her suspiciously. “Are you staying home?” She nods. “Can I go to bed myself?”

“You don’t want me to tuck you in?”

He shakes his head vehemently.

“Okay.”

She climbs the stairs up to her room and opens the window to let the cool September air in. She sits on the edge of the wide bed for a while and wishes, once more, that she knew what George would think, what George would tell her to do.

There’s a soft creak on the stairs. She stands and smoothes the bedcovers where she was sitting, pulls back the corner, then picks up her white sleep shirt from the bottom of the wardrobe. When she turns back to the bed, she can see out of the corner of her eye a sliver of Jim’s face, pale in the crack of the door. A moment later the step creaks again, and she stands still to listen to the soft sound of retreating bare feet, down the stairs and back down the hallway, and when the house is quiet again, to the sound of the quiet house and the air at the window.

***

The next afternoon Chris Pike is at her door. He is older this time, no nervousness in his face, recognizable even without his tunic as command-track. He looks sober, a PADD tucked under his arm and the other hand lightly on her doorframe.

Winona invites him into her living room again, and this time when she offers tea he shakes his head, a hint of humor in his eye. The boys are at school and the house is quiet and it’s a silence for her to fill.

“Why aren’t you on a ship?” she asks.

“I’m assisting some classes and doing defense research for one of the admirals at the ‘Fleet base in San Francisco until the _Yorktown_ launches next fall,” he says.

“Busy work?” she asks, and he makes a considering face.

“I wouldn’t say so,” he says. “The piloting classes I’m assisting are – timid in their methodology, I will admit. But the research we’re doing is going to be used. I’m helping them develop shield systems – I’m doing the computer interface work, of course, not the actual development – but I’m working more actively on evasive maneuvers and lobbying for ship designs to have certain angles of minimum target area.” He launches into an explanation – he’s seen the beginnings of the ship in the Riverside yard and has seen the prints for the rest, which change every week. He thinks the engines are too bulky. She can tell that he’s excited about his work – that the admirals are doing what they need to do to keep him happy for a year dirtside.

She looks him in the eye. “Those things are important, Chris,” she says. “But I need you to ask yourself – why aren’t you working on developing detection systems? Why aren’t these things geared for deep-space exploratory missions? Why aren’t you finding better communications and tracking systems, or even weaponry or gear? And why is it that every time we in the ‘Fleet analyze past data, _yes_ I mean you and your dissertation too, we’re determining what went right instead of what we could have done better? Why is it that no one in the ‘Fleet will dare to suggest that Robau and George – or Singh on the _Dierdre_ , or any other of half a dozen ships destroyed in alien combat over the past half-century – were anything but perfect?”

Chris’s face has closed. She realizes that her voice is full of acid, that her hands are trembling fists. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, and when she opens them again he has moved his PADD onto his lap.

“Winona,” he says quietly but with steel, “you said, ‘we in the ‘Fleet.’” She takes in a sharp breath and looks at him hard, but he continues. “Please tell me that was more than just a slip. Tell me you’ll come to San Francisco, go back on active duty, get into Tactical, because _we need you_.”

She’s quiet for a long time. She thinks about San Francisco – about what the Academy was like in her day, which is mostly full of George but then there are other glimmers of brilliance she got too there, other companionship she doesn’t find in Riverside, and then there’s the solemn new fact she can’t help but share with Chris – “I want the stars again. I do.”

“Then _take them_ ,” he says, leaning forwards, his voice quiet and dry but crackling with an intensity and passion she _knows_ he wasn’t capable of the last time they met, and then there’s the sound of the door rattling.

Sam calls, “Mom, we’re back and we’ve gotta go to town because Miss Gregor kept saying the rockets were due Friday but I thought she meant _next_ Friday, hey who’s here, whose is that vee?” and he peeks his head into the living room and his eyes widen. Winona’s eyes stay on Chris for a long moment before she turns to Sam. Jim is standing very still, several feet behind his older brother, clutching his backpack in both arms.

“Boys,” she says, “this is Ensign Christopher Pike. Chris, these are my sons Sam and Jimmy.” She looks at the wall clock and then at Sam with consternation. “Samuel George, you can’t possibly be asking me to drive you to town yet tonight. It’s twenty to four and everything closes at five.”

“I’m _sorry_ , Mom,” Sam whines, “but I need stuff for the rocket project for sciences, I need to make it tonight!”

She looks at Chris, whose intensity is still there somewhere underneath a ‘Fleet façade of calm and politeness, and then at Jim, whose eyes are not on her but narrowed at Chris. She wonders if her sons recognize Chris as the man they pushed from the house nearly two years ago.

“You’re grounded this weekend, Sam,” Winona says finally and expressionlessly. “Chris, I’m sorry, I –”

“You’ve got boys,” he says with a smile that doesn’t cover his whole face and a shrug of the shoulders, and she has the feeling that those words, and the ugly emotions that well in her instinctually, thoughtlessly when she hears them, will keep her awake at night for some time yet.

***

Chris makes a show of leaving when Winona does, but comes back a few minutes later and sits on the farmhouse porch. He’s got the documents she needs to get back onto active duty, and he’s not going to leave without letting her see them.

He tells himself he’s not being selfish. He knows how much better Starfleet could be with that woman in as a higher-up in Tactical, and she herself said she wants the stars; he tells himself he’s not doing a bad thing. But the kid had _looked_ at him, looked at him with eyes that said little Jimmy knew that he was trying to mess up his family, to take his _mother_ away, for Christssake.

Winona and the boys come back in more than an hour later, going the speed limit down the long dirt road with clouds of dust billowing up behind the ancient red convertible vee. Winona’s wearing sunglasses when she gets out of the car, and she sighs. He can’t tell if her body language is reading relief or disappointment to see him there.

Sam is carrying an armful of assorted bottles and tubes: paint and glue and some sort of light synthetic material that is doubtless meant to be the middle body of the rocket. He inclines his head at Chris as he bangs into the porch and past into the house, only a bit of puzzlement visible on his face. Jim, on the other hand, stands in the doorway of the porch for a long moment, eyeing him, looking genuinely perturbed to see him there.

“Hello, Chris,” Winona says from behind Jim, the exasperation and instruction in her voice clearly meant for her son.

“Hi,” Jim says obediently, with some hint of sarcasm that fits him uncannily well. He folds his arms over his chest and walks through the front door that Sam had left open, shutting it most of the way behind him.

Winona steps into the porch and tilts her head. “Walk away, Jim,” she says with the same exasperation, and leans across the pull the door all the way shut. “Okay,” she says to Chris, “I don’t know what else to say, Ensign. Now I know why you came, but look at what I am, all right, dammit? I may be a genius engineer and an off-duty ‘Fleeter, but I’m the only parent of two prepubescent boys, one of whom has just fifteen minutes ago informed me that he’s been given his _third_ suspension for fist-fighting and he’s only in _fourth grade_ and _this_ is the shit that my life is made of, Chris, _this_ is the tactical maneuvers and the firefights that it’s my job to prevent, and all that other shit is _your_ job.” He can tell she’s almost in tears, but she’s too angry to let them fall; she wipes a hand across her face with no trembling and no semblance of shame and looks at him fiercely.

“You’ll find a way, if you need to,” Chris says when her chest has stopped heaving with angry breaths. “And I’ll help you do that, if you’d like.” He holds up the PADD with the document and taps the title with a finger; he sees her squint her eyes to read the bold form title across the top. “It’s two pages,” he says.

“Ensign,” she says, back to the title again and Chris tells himself it doesn’t sting, “if you don’t respect my motherhood, respect George’s fatherhood. He wouldn’t want me to send his sons off somewhere to chase my own dreams.”

Chris is talking before he has time to think about it. “Winona,” he says. “You told me two years ago, Winona: George is dead and you have no way of knowing what he would have thought or wanted. Don’t put this on him. This decision is _yours_.”

He stands up and pushes the screen door open, climbing down the steps. Winona doesn’t move. He turns to her with his fingertips holding the door open still – lets it shut and speaks to her through the screen. “You can always contact me, whatever you decide,” he says. “Any time you need something. Help. Someone to listen.” She stares down the steps at him, still unresponding, her hands at her side, and he nods once and walks down to his vee and absolutely refuses to look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally posted on LJ comms, before STID. There were plots and plans for more chapters, but it's been a couple years since I started this story, so this might have to be the end. We'll see. Maybe I'll get around to writing more someday.


End file.
